Self Indulgent
by Virtual Refrain
Summary: It's 1973. There's a new patient at the Smith's Grove Sanitarium, and she has developed an unhealthy interest in their most famous resident, Michael Myers. Mostly based off Halloween 1978 and Halloween 2018. Michael/OC.
1. Chapter One

They tell me I should keep a journal. Something to record my time here I suppose. To be honest, I'm not very good at keeping track of time. Or myself.

Smith's Grove Sanitarium.

This place isn't a happy one. It's sterile. Plain. I hate the uniforms they make us wear. It matches how pristine the sanitarium is.

The nurses are nice enough though—towards me at least. I'm glad they let me put up my drawings onto the walls of my room that would've gone otherwise empty. I think it's because I'm one of the few of the Dangerous Patients they can hold a "proper" conversation with.

I'm cognizant they say. Aware. Which meant I should be stimulated as such.

Jennifer is my favorite. I don't know her last name. The staff says it's for protective purposes—doctor's only. She's a dirty blonde, five feet even, and very pretty. I asked her to cut my hair as short as the facility would allow one day, and she happily obliged. I love Jennifer.

*

My first year here was a slog. I would receive uneasy looks from the staff—all of the patients deemed Dangerous did. I hated being lumped up with them.

One was a man who had gone "rabid," for lack of a better term. He chewed off the face of a bar patron. He only spoke in riddles if asked questions directly. Another had been holed up in the ceiling, and refused to be acknowledged by her parents. She killed them with piano wire around the throat. Her parents had given her lessons when they still pretended to love her. Poetic justice it seemed.

I myself don't remember what I did. The police said I murdered my mother, but I have a hard time believing them. I refused to see the body.

Then there was their most famous patient. Michael Myers.

He had already been here for nearly a decade when I initially caught a glimpse of him. I'm not sure I trust the staff to keep us all together and safe.

I've had nightmares of them killing me where I slept. Especially Michael.

The reports I read before my admittance were true. His eyes looked distant. It never seemed like he was truly there during our group therapy sessions. He had separate private sessions with Doctor Loomis; who had a reputation for being short with staff.

I noticed him a couple of times, and I think the good doctor knew I had been watching him in one of those few instances because he commented on my appearance.

"Oh. You've changed your hair," he had said.

I think he meant it to be a compliment.

I also noticed that Michael had a tendency to look something close to annoyed after his sessions with Doctor Loomis. Or maybe I'm just projecting. Again, I don't know. I've never talked to him to properly gauge a personality.

I'm no psychiatrist.

"He can talk," Jennifer told me one day. "The doctors said his vocal cords work fine. He just doesn't want to."

"I don't think I've ever seen him try to make friends," I murmured back.

"He doesn't seem the type to really need friends."

Now I won't sit here and delude myself into thinking "oh, what if I could be Michael's friend? He'd definitely talk to me!"

That's the kind of thinking that gets you fucking killed. I am of the camp that if you kill someone who's a family member—or like a family member to you—you'd most assuredly kill someone who's a virtual stranger to you.

I'm surprised they haven't taken away his metal cutlery privileges.

*

It's Tuesday. For the younger patients there are classes held. It's always one volunteer teacher. They even give us homework. Something to make it seem familiar. Almost normal.

Today it's Mr. Jones. He's teaching Oedipus. In my opinion, it seems a little morbid to have a lesson about a story that involves incest, eye gouging, and suicide with proven killers amongst the students. I wonder if they'll fire whoever signed off on it.

I sit in the front of the classroom. I have trouble hearing and reading the board from further away, so I prefer sitting as close as I can to the instructor. In school, I always hated sitting behind people who never failed to whisper in class.

Fortunately the class was small. They would break us by age groups. Unfortunately, this also meant I was grouped with Michael at least sixty percent of the time. The other forty percent was with Michael _and_ the other Dangerous Patients.

Michael sat in the very back, as if to make himself invisible. Mr. Jones went on, my discomfort going unnoticed. I willed myself to not spare a glance at the vacant eyed young man. They tell me he's only two years my senior. Add that to the growing list of things I don't believe.

My psychiatrist, Doctor Taylor, says I'm not obsessed. He thinks my wariness is normal for someone who is pretty close to the famous killer, but he does tell me I should focus more on my own recovery.

"Do you talk to the orderlies who have to chain and unchain him?" I ask.

"On occasion," he admits cryptically. "We have a higher turnover rate because of it."

"Because of him," I nod. "Does he creep you out too?"

The session ends before he could reply.

I wouldn't have blamed him if he had said yes.

*

I draw Michael sometimes—when he isn't looking of course, but I think he knows somehow. I keep the drawings in my pillowcase. Jennifer makes sure the orderlies don't check my pillow when they make their weekly inspections. She doesn't want me to become a target, but deep down, I don't think Michael would care either way. Regardless, I still don't want him to know.

I'm scared, but I still draw him.

I feel so exposed every time I'm near him. Do others feel like this? Like we're nothing around him? It doesn't feel like he's narcissistic either. Nothing like him feeling a sense of superiority over us.

I've felt that before with my mother. Everything had to be about her, and like all narcissists, she refused treatment.

Michael is something wholly different.

*

After my first year they let me have razors.

"For good behavior," they said.

I wonder briefly if Michael gets the same treatment. He still has to be escorted with handcuffs. I only had to deal with that my first six months, and he's already been here for more than a decade now.

Doctor Taylor says it's "at the behest of Doctor Loomis." He probably knows better than us.

"Pure evil" is what the articles about Michael described him as.

Sometimes I think it's overkill, but other times I'm comforted by it. Especially now when my nightmares as of late have become horrifyingly vivid. It's been the same dream for the last two weeks.

I am running in the middle of a street light lit road. It's dark. No one is around for miles. I'm screaming. Michael is chasing me while wearing some sort of mask. He has a knife like the one he used to kill his sister, Judith. He catches me—he always does. Finally, I wake up to the plunging of the knife into my chest.

I always wake up in a cold sweat. Doctor Taylor shows worry for me when I tell him it's the second week. He tries to convince the board of specialists to have me relocated from the sanitarium.

They decline.

"I'll keep trying," he says gently. "You're receptive to our treatments, the classes, everything. I'll get you out."

I nod at him, but I'm still afraid. Do I deserve to leave?


	2. Chapter Two

My teeth hurt.

I've never been too good at taking care of myself even before becoming a patient. If it hadn't been for the nurses, Jennifer, I would have fared worse during my stay.

I step over the fresh pooling blood as I follow the other patients outside. It's raining and dark. I didn't think to ask Doctor Taylor what day it was, so time is a little nebulous to me at the moment.

Headlights beam a few miles out, and I make my way through the other wandering patients. I walk out of the pried open gate. It was damaged beyond repair.

Michael.

He's escaped.

*

It's 1982–I know because the first thing I did when I got out was grab a newspaper. If my math is right, it's been four years since that night.

My name is Shannon Melissa Davis.

At least that's what it says on the I.D. I stole from the staff's records office—I looked enough like her. Thankfully, no one had asked me too many questions when I applied for missing documents.

"House fire," I had said.

I didn't travel too far out. I took frequent stops if I felt I was close to detection, so it caused me to have a few days of travel. Mason, Illinois is where I ended up. It's a very small town of about maybe two hundred, but no one knew me here—I had originally been born in Iowa.

Can't afford to go back home.

Making friends in a new town wasn't too difficult—at least, it wasn't when both of them were as extroverted as they came.

K. C. O'Neill was easy going but very excitable when it came to her psychiatry classes. She's a big Doctor Loomis fan. Violet Castilleja on the other hand was outgoing in her gothic dress and her sharp wit. The tattoo artist with no tattoos to speak of.

"I'll come up with my own design some day," she had said once.

The two had already been dating their respective boyfriends, Gabriel Lopez and Eddie Rivera by the time I became familiar with them. Gabriel was the strong, silent type, but very much into his uncle's record shop. Whereas Eddie made his keep at the arcade, and never failed to sneak the rest of us some extra tickets if we all kept quiet.

*

"Dolphins kill sharks, y'know," I said as I flipped through the pages of my Biology textbook.

The college's library was almost empty this late in the day. I sat with my little group in an almost hidden corner.

"What?" asked Eddie.

"You know how sharks have to keep moving to breathe underwater, right?" I continued.

"Yeah," said K.C..

"Dolphins converge as a group, they surround the shark to stop it from moving."

"Basically suffocating it to death, right?" Violet finished.

I nod, "yep."

"What the fuck!" Eddie exclaimed, horrified. "Why do they do that?"

"For fun I guess?" K.C. shrugged, "dolphins are, like, the second smartest creatures on earth—humans being number one."

"Kind of like how some humans just do fucked up shit for fun?" murmured Gabriel.

"Man, _fuck_ dolphins," declared Eddie in a huff.

"That's why I like sharks. They're just trying to live," I reasoned. "They eat, they breathe, and they procreate. There's almost an innocent pureness to it because they're not sentient."

"You're saying they're dumb?"

"Not exactly," K.C. said as she tapped her eraser onto the tip of her nose.

"Sentience means they can feel complex emotions—love, fear, anger—what's she's saying is that sharks just live," Violet clarified.

"They don't have to think," Gabriel chimed in.

"_Fuck _dolphins," repeated Eddie.

"More importantly," began Violet seriously. "What are we gonna be doing for Halloween this year? And don't say full moon orgy because I am _not _in the mood."

Eddie promptly closed his mouth with an unnecessarily dramatic roll of the eyes. Gabriel snickered.

"Well, we went to the corn maze last year, and did that bonfire the year before that…" K. C. pursed her lips in thought.

"What about just watching some scary movies at home?" I suggested quietly before receiving a lighthearted slap on the shoulder courtesy of Violet. I grinned.

"Oh come on, you _always _suggest that, Ann."

"I've got simple tastes," I shrug helplessly.

"_Boring_, is what she meant," agreed Eddie as he adjusted his green rimmed glasses. "So full moon orgy is out. What about going to a spooky house?"

"Like a real one?" Gabriel asked, chewing absentmindedly on his coffee lid. "The only one I know of is several miles out."

"Not _that _one!" hissed K. C. "You know how antsy she gets when _I _talk about Loomis—imagine how she'd feel if we tried going _there_!"

I took a deep breath to reorient myself.

None of them knew about the Sanitarium. And why should they? They'd probably look at me differently because of it. I was finally able to live a normal life after severing that part of myself.

My mother was dead. For better or for worse, and I needed to keep that buried. They couldn't know about Michael either. How he inadvertently assisted my escape.

In a strange way, I felt indebted to him. After reading about that night at Haddonfield in the papers all those years ago, there was no way I'd mention my loose connection to Michael. I didn't want them to think I was the same as him.

_Never_.

"What about Susan's costume party?" suggested Eddie. "Violet, you totally hate her, and you could show her up by just being there!"

The dark haired woman turned her nose up and smirked at the idea. "Very true. Girl's still obsessed with Charlie, so I could invite him too."

"Gross. Weasel Brain?" K. C. grimaced and Gabriel laughed. "What?! He's got that terrible peach fuzz—definitely weasel aura."

"I mean, we _could_ go to Clifford Olson's execution," I finally joked as casually as I could manage. "He got convicted this year, right?"

"Please don't joke like that," breathed the would-be redheaded psychiatrist. "I'd kill for front row seats."

"Uh, same here."

"Me too."

"Don't count me out either."

"Okay, so glad to know we're all on the side of child murder is bad," I grinned wryly, steadier now. "Susan's party. What's the game plan—what costumes are we wearing?"

"I could go as Batman," Gabriel's tone very serious.

"Hot. Maybe I could be a flower child?" K. C. hummed thoughtfully.

"But you dress like that all the time."

"Yeah, and I'm sure you were just gonna dress as yourself too," she playfully stuck out her tongue at a smirking Violet.

"You're not wrong," she conceded. "What about you, babe?"

"I dunno," Eddie scratched at his goatee. "Clown? I know how much you like them."

"I guess I'll be... Indiana Jones?"

"_Everyone_ is gonna be Indiana Jones," Gabriel said earnestly.

"I know! I can't think of anything honestly," I blurted out hysterically. "This is the _worst_."

But I was happy regardless. Having friends, a stable job at the library, and college. It was more than I could have asked for.

"We've got time to figure it out," K. C. reassured me.


End file.
